In Bloomberg View, Megan McArdle discusses new research that shows that the more couples pool their money, the happier their marriage is. These effects seem to peter out at some very high level—if you keep 5 percent of your income to yourself in order to have a little bit of discretionary spending, it won’t make you any less happy than you’d be if you pool 100 percent. But people who pool 80 percent are happier than those who pool 70 percent, and so on. People who keep it all to themselves are the least happy. McArdle cops to possible selection bias (if you don’t trust your spouse, you’re not going to be pooling money), but also notes that couples that don’t pool their earnings fight more about money. That’s not exactly what I found when I surveyed almost 6,000 Slate readers for my Home Economics project. I didn’t ask about happiness specifically, but I did ask about how often couples fought about money. There were negligible differences in the amount of fighting among couples that pooled all their money, some of their money, and none of their money. |